Linux system starting to act like Windows

In the past couple days my system has been acting like Windows. Things arn't opening up instantly anymore, sometimes opening a folder wont open at all, then 20 of them open at once. The GUI sometimes completely locks up. I can still access the console most of the time, unless the cursor gets stuck as the hand icon then I have to hit the reset button.
Why is it doing this, is there any log I can check? I left windows for this exact reason. I just hate how it can randomly lock up or get slow for no reason. I've done tons of memtest and all the diagnostics you can imagine. Burn in tests, the whole shebang. Everything is rock solid. I'm running Xubuntu 11.10 on a Core i7 3.6Ghz with 12GB of ram and a SSD.

Also, colord usually has a crash report after I reset the computer, I don't know if that would be indicative of anything.